Eek! A week from today we'll have our at home visit for our home study. It's the final visit in the home study process.
Our social worker will be coming to our house this time. Not sure what all she'll want to see, but at the least I know it will be a tour of our home, followed by our 2-3 hour meeting. Let the cleaning spree begin!
I've heard others compare this to cleaning for a good friend coming over, vs. cleaning for your mother-in-law to come over. His family used the same agency and said the good friend cleaning is fine. And the social worker told us the cleanliness of the home is not what they are observing here...it's the type of home we have, if we have a place for our child, and to get a better picture of how we live our lives and what's important to us.
But how can you not want to clean the hell out of your place? I mean, these are the folks who will be writing about you as suitable future parents in the home study document. If there ever was a person to clean for, the social worker seems to rank pretty high up on the list.
We've only lived here for just over 3 years. We've done a tremendous amount of work to our home already, but I look around and see bits of unfinished projects (the baseboard moulding needs to be stained and installed where we put in the new floor) and things that still need to be done (window coverings in the bedrooms and the kitchen has 3 different colors of paint on the walls).
The basement has stacks of boxes we haven't unpacked yet (goodness knows what's in them--we've been toting them around the country for the past 10 years). There's a wall of household goods to be donated to foster care, with another pile of stuff destined for a rummage sale.
Just to make things more fun, we had flooding in the basement overnight from a huge storm, and so now the entire mess is sopping wet. Agghghgh. Fortunately The Man was off of work today and took care of that clean-up.
I'm taking next week off of work to get prepared. It will make me feel much better to have this house scoured, and will make it less stressful to have the week to do it. I know I'm crazy, but I think I'm going to try and squeeze in painting the kitchen too. Over achiever...I know. Perhaps I should just concentrate on cleaning....
We still have a little paperwork left to gather, and to re-edit our 10 page (yes, 10!) biographies that we wrote for our Lifelink homestudy. Our new biographies need to be slimmed down to 4 pages. But other than that, we are about finished.
The next step: the home study will take about a month to write, and then it will be submitted, along with our formal application to our agency in Michigan. A little progress!
It's hard not to go overboard on the cleaning but really, they could care less, they're just concerned about safety. On the other hand, you'll have a nicely deep cleaned home! :) At our homestudy update this year we had the baby's room completely demo'ed. Yeah, we're ready for placement... I think I picked up the piles and organized them nicely...that was it. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteI cleaned like a CRAZY PERSON for our home visit. I was completely unhinged over the whole thing! We'd lived in the house for about the same amount of time you have, and I cleaned in places that had never seen light since we moved in! So imagine my disappointment (or relief?) when the 'tour' portion of the visit lasted less than five minutes!
ReplyDeleteThey pretty much just want to make sure there are no glaring safety issues. She checked the number of smoke detectors and noted the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. They'll want to see that your stairs can be made safe if you have any. They won't care about your paint or anything, so don't worry! :) You're going to do great!
Gotta love progress! Like the others have said, we all definitely have that feeling of needing a spotless house. But to tell you the truth, our SW barely looked around. She checked all the important stuff like smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. They like to verify the square footage of the house, and make sure that the baby's room is appropriate. One thing we missed was that our daughter's room is on the second floor of our house, so we were required to get an emergency ladder and store it in her room in case of fire.
ReplyDeleteI would focus your efforts on the room you plan to sit and chat with her in. Make some coffee, and enjoy it as much as you can :) You'll be fine!
OMG. I completely forgot about smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, etc. Thanks so much ladies for reminding me!
ReplyDeleteHate to be the downer on this whole comment section but we had a social worker that opened closet and looked in every room and even in our garage;( I was sweating bullets. then, he walked into the bathroom and dirty undies were laying there..aghhhh! Horrible!! I do not know to this day how that happened. But apparently it didn't affect our homestudy.So, I say clean it good and then it will feel good to have it done whether or not they get up close and personal with closets. Oh, and they didn't even check our smoke detectors, weird, huh?
ReplyDeleteWhy doesn't anyone tell bio parents about the need for an emergency ladder? I totally need to go and get one.
ReplyDeleteLike everyone else who has been through it, I will tell you don't stress, friend-cleaning is definitely fine, your SW is just making sure you have an actual house w/a roof, etc....
ReplyDeleteI will, however, admit that during the tour of our home, I had to tell our SW "oh, don't lean up against the dining room walls, I'm not sure the paint is quite dry."...that's right, I finished painting a room I'd lived w/for 4 years about 30 mins. before our SW arrived :)